


straightforwardly (without complexities or pride)

by winchilsea



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-05
Updated: 2012-12-05
Packaged: 2017-11-20 08:21:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/583244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winchilsea/pseuds/winchilsea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He tells him about the inevitability of time and that it's okay to him that Bond will one day die and leave him behind. Bond frowns in the middle of kissing Q's neck and asks him if it's really okay. Q sips his tea. Laughs.</p><p>Of course it's not bloody okay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	straightforwardly (without complexities or pride)

i.

Q is anything but young. Age is but a number and he doesn't dwell on it, but he knows—knows it like lines of code on the back of his eyelids—that he has, quite possibly, never been young. As he trades quips on age and youth with 007, he bites back the truth that they both know.

Neither of them has ever been young.

 

ii.

Childhood was a period where everything was the bleak, foggy London sky and laughter he always imagines were scornful. Childhood was the constant buzz of seeing too much, adrenaline running in his system even as he sat still, recognizing patterns, inhaling inputs and then exhaling outputs. Childhood was a period where his parents still indulged him.

Q wonders what 007 thinks of his own childhood.

 

iii.

An intern accidentally comments on how besotted Q is with 007 within his hearing range and he sends a virus to her personal laptops, a cycle of continuous porn pop-ups and flickering screens enough to send someone into a fit. Q is not besotted with 007. "Besotted" recalls the image of a mooning middle-aged woman or a lovesick teenage boy fiddling with the strings of a guitar as he's convinced he's the next Freddie Mercury or some such nonsense. "Besotted" implies that 007 has him wrapped around his finger, liable to acquiesce to the slightest of whims. "Besotted" implies that the flow of power is one-sided and Q is upstream.

Q is not besotted and neither is 007.

 

iv.

Moneypenny teases him about being too secretive, about taking espionage too seriously. She doesn't mean it, of course. Q is what keeps MI6 functioning, sequestered away in his labs at all hours of the day, typing and typing, his eyes skittering across luminescent screens, deciphering and encrypting. "It's like you know a completely different world," says Moneypenny, and she very carefully doesn't mention how he sometimes emerges from that world for 007.

It's just as well.

 

v.

Four years have passed since Skyfall and the nervous edge of being new has melted away, leaving deadly efficiency behind. He is the youngest Quartermaster MI6 has ever had and arguably the most dangerous. This would be true even without the red dot always on the edge of his vision labeled "007". The only reason he has conceded to this is that he knows everything, all knowledge being traded over lines of code invariably ends up in his path, and he knows that MI6 would fear him without Bond, believing him to be tamer with the man and vice versa. It's laughable, and Bond agrees.

Whatever burgeoning affection they have only makes them more volatile.

 

vi.

(They have two different stories for their first kiss.)

(a.)
A year and a half after Skyfall and a week after dropping off the map for the fifth time, Bond showed up in Q Branch looking none the worse, except Q knew, of course, that Bond was fighting a limp after landing on his knee wrong and there was the slightest bulge visible underneath his tailored suit from bandages after getting stabbed. Q was, needless to say, unimpressed. He was even more unimpressed when the agent confessed to losing all of his equipment with a small smile and a nonchalant shrug.
Seething, Q squeezed his eyes shut and gnawed on the inside of his cheek, a poor substitute for biting Bond's head off, but the last thing he wanted to do was visibly—and audibly—lose his temper in front of his people. Respect and image were two things hard earned and easily lost.
"You're angry," said Bond.
"Yes," he bit out, "of course I am." He opened his eyes and was momentarily taken aback when the agent was right beside him, but he plowed on, barely managing to keep his voice flat. "Your equipment, 007, does not come cheap, nor can it simply be bought." Bond picked up an enlarged model of prototype camera to be fitted to a contact lens someday, and Q's hand darted out and closed around Bond's wrist before continuing, much in the same vein, "Need I remind you that the last radio you lost turned up on the black market in the bastardized form?"
Bond made a soft noise of agreement and Q dropped his hand, returning to his laptop.
"I apologize," said Bond.
"Apologize," said Q, fingers landing on the keys a little harder than usual, "to the members of Q Branch who have just seen their projects postponed because all of their funding has been siphoned to ensure that 007 gets to keep throwing away his toys like a selfish, spoiled child." Turning to glare at Bond would have been ineffective, so he kept his eyes on the screen and didn't notice when Bond stepped even closer until there was a warm breath on his neck and callused fingers gripping his jaw.
His pulse was leaping, and he was glad it was easily blamed on the anger. He attempted a disgruntled frown but then Bond smirked—infuriating, really—, said, "Let me make it up to you," and then kissed him before he could agonize on how utterly cheesy the line sounded.
Q, with his eyes still opened, saw amusement in Bond's and he pressed his fingers into the man's wound, eliciting a pained hiss.
"Get out," he said, straightening his glasses.
"Q—"
"Get out and come back when you've got your libido under control, 007. Q Branch has no room for your games."
He didn't watch Bond leave, too busy scrambling to pick up the pieces of his dignity after being made a fool of in front of his people.


 

(b.)
A significant amount of time after that, Q came to a conclusion: Bond was in love. Namely, Bond was in love with him. If Q were a different person, he would snuff out the thought like a piece of extraneous code. But Q had read through Bond's file and knew the man fell in love, completely and wholly, in the blink of an eye.
That didn't mean Q simply leaped into this conclusion. No, he observed Bond and tested him, thoroughly and quietly, until there was no doubt in his mind. The tipping point was when Bond came back with his arm burned after making an attempt to save his equipment.
It was very late, or very early, depending, and Q headed to the infirmary, perfectly timed to the exit of the medical experts.
"Bond," he greeted. "Thank you for returning the Walther."
"My pleasure," replied Bond, lacking his usual pomp and luster.
Q made no effort to hide his appreciative stare at the man's torso as he pulled a shirt over his head and was pleased when Bond was visibly stumped.
Not in the business of rushing things, Q said, "How's your arm? I'd despair if MI6 lost their best agent because he stuck his hands into the fire to pull out one of my gadgets."
"I thought they were priceless."
"Priceless, yes, but gadgets nonetheless." He stepped closer, within reach of the bandages wrapping Bond's arm and let his fingers hover above the surface. "Gadgets that were designed to save your life—not endanger it."
Bond shrugged, easy, nonchalant. Q knew everything that happened around him, he was far more observant than his peers and even his betters, but Bond sometimes threw him in for a loop like this. He hadn't bothered to look beneath the façade, hadn't even thought that there was anything more to the man than the façade. When people devoted their lives to something for as long as Bond had, there tended to not be anything left of them.
Well then. It wasn't often that Q was wrong.
He removed his glasses and bent forward, pressing his lips to Bond's. It was simple and chaste and when Bond followed the motion of Q's tongue with his eyes, he smiled and did it again, fingers resting on Bond's pulse points and reveling in the way it leaped.


 

vii.

Q's name still belongs to him and Bond still fucks women—and the occasional men—on his missions. When Bond is England, and if there is time, they allow themselves to get tangled under Q's sheets, messy and satiated. Q digs his fingers into the skin of Bond's shoulders, vicious and jealous and Bond doesn't hold back, gives it to him so hard that he'd break if he were actually as frail as everyone thinks he is.

It's not perfect, and yet, somehow, it is.

 

viii.

"You know everything about me," James says one day and Q smiles over the top of his mug and says yes. His lovely agent has a disconcerted look, determined and yet hesitant, so Q takes him by the hand and leads him to the couch, sits him down and curls into him, steam and the scent of Earl Grey wafting into their faces. He tells him about his mother and father, so proud in a distant way, never really quite there. He tells him about his sister, younger and brighter, who still fills the void that Q's birth punctured. He tells him about the inevitability of time and that it's okay to him that Bond will one day die and leave him behind. Bond frowns in the middle of kissing Q's neck and asks him if it's really okay. Q sips his tea. Laughs.

Of course it's not bloody okay.

 

ix.

The thing about the inevitability of time is that it is, of course, inevitable—unavoidable, inescapable, predetermined. Q knows that there is a bullet out there bound to prevent the resurrection of James Bond before it even punctures his skin, red coming out in rivets. "Agent down," says Q, and he sips his tea, allowing the chaos churning in MI6 to continue on around him. He flags down one of his assistants to keep an eye on the situation as he reports to M about the development. Moneypenny looks grim when she opens the door for him but he can't imagine why; he'd only said hello. M looks much the same as Moneypenny and two weeks later there is a funeral. The London sky is foggy and grey like his childhood, like the sky above Skyfall, according to James. Black, the color of mourning, blooms across the graveyard. It's not the first funeral they've held for the man, and this is like the boy who cried wolf because fewer people show up each time.

Q stays home on his laptop, in his pajamas, and doesn't drink his Earl Grey until he's ruined the men who brought James Bond down.

 

x.

Mourning is still a new flavor, eight months later. Everyone walked on eggshells around him until he wired all of their personal electronics to shock them and now they still walk on eggshells around him, just for an entirely different reason. Life goes on. Q is now unequivocally the best resource at the disposal of MI6, and the new 007 sometimes wonders why her quartermaster doesn't like her. Q pointedly doesn't roll his eyes or tell her it's because he's a better shot than she is. No one deigns to explain to her that he and her predecessor were fucking. It's been eight months and Q thinks that he might just finally visit the grave when the year marker passes, but for now he packs up his things and heads back to his flat. Mourning is a new flavor, but he's already tired of it. He walks blindly to the couch in the darkness and stumbles onto it, exhausted.

Callused fingers grip his jaw, a warm breath ghosting over him.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Pablo Neruda's Sonnet XVII. Went for the less well-known line.
> 
> 12/6: Now with an unofficial part xi in the comments.


End file.
